


Chara

by minaviolet



Category: Shugo Chara!
Genre: Gen, More like an oc insert tbh, Probably won't get to canon for a while, Reincarnation, Self-Insert, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2018-12-15 00:37:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11794791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minaviolet/pseuds/minaviolet
Summary: A girl gets reborn into the world of Shugo Chara—and promptly destroys the plot."Wait, this isn't what's supposed to happen—"[DISCONTINUED] [UP FOR ADOPTION]





	1. Death by Tall Building

I believed in reincarnation, in my first life. Or, at least, that was what I told all the people who asked. In reality, I was a depressingly pessimistic person. I believed death would be like an eternal coma—going to sleep, and then never waking up.

I was wrong. Utterly, absolutely wrong. On occasion I wonder if an eternal coma would have been better than what actually happened.

I’ll start with how exactly I know this.

I died because I fell off a building. A thirty story building. By accident.

Yes, I know what you’re probably thinking. How on _earth_ does one fall off a _thirty story building_ by _accident_?

It was a stupid decision on my part, made while I was high on adrenaline and an adolescent that thought there was no way I could die from this, not if I was _careful._

But even that’s not enough, sometimes.

I was lucky my heart stopped before I hit the ground—I do _not_ want to know what feeling your skull crack and your brain turn to mush would have felt—and that my soul was already pulling away from my shell of a body by the time it passed the tenth story of the building.

But hey, at least it wasn’t a car accident. Considering the events that followed, that would have been far too unbelievably cliché.

It was still an accidental death, though, because I didn’t _mean_ to fall. I was pessimistic, not suicidal. It was just a matter of the wall surrounding the roof being a bit too short and me stepping back a few steps too far.

I really hope no one marked it off as a suicide.

My foot hit nothing but air, and the next thing I knew, I was free-falling through the air. It was kind of exhilarating, feeling all that wind rushing by, if I ignored the sheer terror and fear I felt— _ohmygod oh mygod I’m gonna die I’m actually gonna die whyno notyet no pleaseno—_

And then suddenly I didn’t feel anything. Well, I’d stopped falling at least. I blinked, then looked around.

And then I realized I was floating around fifty feet high. So…was that it? Do you just become a ghost after death? Those were my thoughts at the time.

I didn’t have the time to think for too long though, because I felt a weird tug somewhere in my chest—metaphorically, I suppose, since my actual body was somewhere on the cement, bloody and broken—and my spirit was pulled away to wherever souls went after death.

I felt a sensation somewhat like my body— _no wait I’m dead, I don’t have a body_ —was being pushed through an entrance far too small to accommodate it.

Let me tell you now, being born was painful. It’s hard for the mother, but no less hard for the baby. That sensation was the precursor to one of the most scarring experiences of my second life.

I didn’t immediately realize what was going on, as I was held in a warm pair of arms. I tried to move my body—I could tell I had one now, how else would I be able to feel sensation?—but found I couldn’t.

My eyelids were still closed, I realized partway through my assessment of my new body. I tried opening them—and promptly regretted it. A lot. Turns out, there’s a reason infants don’t usually open their eyes until a day or two has passed. Their eyes still haven’t adjusted to the light, and it _hurt_ , which I had just discovered.

I shrieked in pain—or I thought I did, but all I could hear was a loud, jarring wailing. Whoever’s baby that was, I wished they’d shut it up, I thought as I closed my eyes again.

The wailing stopped abruptly.

“ _Ā, kanojo wa naki yamimashita.”_

Was that Japanese? I recognized some of it—I’d been an avid anime/manga fan for years before my death, and you tend to pick up a little when you get overly obsessed with it. Not to the point of understanding it, at risk of sounding conceited, but enough that you can pinpoint when someone is speaking the language.

The voice—it sounded like a she—had said something about a girl stopping. Stopping what?

_“Kanojo wa, utsukushīdesu ne?”_

This voice was male. Calling a girl beautiful…hey, wait, was _I_ the one the voices were talking about? I wasn’t really pretty or anything…and I didn’t recognize any of the voices either, so why did they sound so fond of me?

And…where was I? Didn’t I die? Did I maybe survive the fall? That didn’t explain the Japanese voices in what should have been an American hospital, though…

_“Kanojo no namae wa nanidesu ka?”_

It was the male voice again. _Namae…_ name? _Nani_ …what, and he spoke in a questioning voice…were they asking for my name? I tried to speak, but all that came out were muffled gurgles.

_“Ā, kanojo wa totemo kawaī, ne? Kono ko no namae wa…Amu.”_

Uh, did they just name me? Hey, I already had a name! It was—wait, Amu? That sounded vaguely familiar…and also, terrible. What kind of name is Amu? Sounds like that one Australian bird…

The male voice spoke up again. _“Ii namae, sore wa. Atashitachi no Hinamori Amu.”_

Translation: good name, our Hinamori Amu…whoa, wait what?

What.

Hinamori…Amu? My mind conjured images of a pink-haired girl with golden eyes, small flying people, and magical girl-type shoujo transformations.

Haha, no. That wasn’t possible. It was just some freak coincidence. I couldn’t have been reborn as the main character of a shoujo anime/manga.

Then I heard a squeal that sounded vaguely familiar from the direction I had judged the male voice— _my new dad_ —to be. Amu’s dad had squealed a lot, hadn’t he?

If only I could see properly…

Or maybe I was asleep and this was all just a hallucination. Maybe when I woke up next, I’d be in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

With that somewhat uprising thought, my newborn body seemed to have had enough fun with the world, and I promptly fell asleep.

 


	2. Babyhood

A month passed, in which I spent my days sleeping, eating, and pooping. Diapers were a horrible nightmare—but not so different from period pads if I tried to ignore certain disgusting sensations. Feeding was scarring—I will not recount my memories of—shudder— _breastfeeding._

Frankly, it was boring, and I resolved to try as hard as possible to regain my past motor skills. Going from a fairly active teenager to a newborn baby was like suddenly being transformed into a pillow—I could feel everything around me, but I couldn’t see a thing or interact with the world. I could barely even turn my head.

I didn’t want to look like a prodigy or anything, though—attention was the last thing I needed, and I was lucky that I had been born into a world not to different from my prior one, excluding the existence of magic. That was to say, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had become a prodigy—it would have evened out into to me just being a bit smarter than my peers when I became older.

After all, there was no war involving child prodigies happening in this world. Imagine I had been reborn into _Naruto_ or, _Bleach_. No thank you.

But even then, I barely understood the language and I wanted to learn quickly. Not understanding the people who surrounded you was a _pain_ , especially when you could see their expressions fall when you didn’t respond to them. These people may not have been my original parents, but they were all I had for the time being, and I had to adjust to that quickly when I realized I _wouldn’t_ be going back to my old life. My stealing their daughter’s body didn’t give me the right to take away the loving relationship that these parents had had—or could have had, in this world—with their daughter.

I felt more than a little guilt over that.

Reading had also been a favorite pastime of mine in my previous life, and the faster I could speak Japanese, the faster I could begin learning how to read it.

Since all I could do as of now was listen and vocalize, that was exactly what I did. I listened to my parents talking—they called each other “Mama” and “Papa,” just like Amu’s parents had done in _Shugo Chara!_ —and tried to absorb the language, looking for patterns and repeating occasional syllables. There was one benefit in being a newborn baby, at the very least—neuroplasticity. The way a baby’s brain was simply more malleable made it easier for me to absorb knowledge like a sponge. That said, it did bring up the question of how my reincarnation had worked—did my soul hold my memories, if my brain was not the same as this newborn’s brain?

When it was later at night, and ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ slept, I tried to regain use of my vocal cords. I started with English—I was familiar with it, and hopefully once I got the hang of it, I could speak my first Japanese word to my parents.

About two months later, my first English word in private was “falling.” It kind of pissed me off. Three months after that, my first words to my parents would be, in order, “Mama” and “Papa.”

In the middle of all that time, I finally managed to open my eyes and not be subsequently blinded by light. After repeated exposure, the colorful blobs surrounding me took on distinct shapes, and I got my first good look at my parents.

One look was all I needed, really. My mother wore ovular glasses and had her hair tied up in a bun—my father had brown hair that defied gravity and visible stubble. If I hadn’t known better, I would have pegged them for cosplayers—since I did, I resigned myself to the sad truth.

I had been reincarnated as, by some twist of fate, Hinamori Amu.


	3. Toddlerhood

As time went on, my parents soon decided that their baby girl needed to learn how to socialize. I was firmly against this.

It wasn’t that I had been antisocial or anything in my past life, or even that I hated children. I simply didn’t want to have to try and attempt to socialize on the level of children whose intelligence was such that they probably couldn’t even form coherent thoughts yet.

A rude thing to think, but that made it no less true. Unfortunately, I had no choice in this matter.

“Come on, Amu-chan! We’re going to the playground!” My mother said cheerfully and she lifted and cradled the one-year-old me in her arms.

I groaned in response, and she frowned.

“You need to make friends, okay?” Her voice holds a tone of sternness, and I know that there’s no way of escaping this. She places me in my stroller—there is no measuring how thankful I am that she doesn’t wear a baby carrier—and off we go, into the calm streets of our neighborhood.

The houses aren’t all identical, but they do all have that stereotypical ‘suburban’ feel, which I guess exists even in Japan. Each one has a nice white picket fence surrounding a pretty garden, which different kinds of flowers in every resident’s garden.

The neighborhood is almost surreal in its serenity.

The playground is not far from our house, and we reach it quickly. My mother makes a straight beeline to what I quickly dub the Housewives’ Bench, but not before she lifts me out of my stroller and carefully places me in the sandbox.

I grimace at the gritty texture of the sand. I’m going to spend hours getting it out of my clothes when I get home, I just know it…

Is it even safe to leave a one-year-old in a sandbox? Couldn’t I choke or something? Not that I was overly terrified of death anymore like I had been in my past life, but this world probably needed its female heroine.

Whose role was now my job to play, I supposed. I’d presumably already deviated from the original timeline, but in a world like the one I lived in, what mattered in the end was that everyone was happy. There was no risk of anyone dying if I changed a few things, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

…As soon as I got my hands on pencil and paper, I would write down everything I remembered about this show. In English, so no one wondered why I had a journal full of creepy-stalkerish notes.

After a year, my memories of it were already starting to fade, not to mention I hadn’t exactly watched religiously or anything in my past life. It had just been a fun pastime. The more time that passed, the faster I would forget everything.

I was roused out of my thoughts by a tug on the sleeve of my onesie.


	4. Ugh, Children

Today was my first day of kindergarten—or nursery school, whatever they called it around here. I wasn’t exactly the most social of people, so I didn’t have huge hopes for the day. I wasn’t one of the clingy children that refused to let go of their parents, nor was I one of the sobbing children that refused to listen to their teachers and screamed for their mothers.

The nursery school I went to was small, but cute, with glass windows covered in cute chibi animal stickers. It was the Hanako—flower child—Kindergarten, with each of the classes named after flowers. A bit girly, but nice all the same. I was in the Sakura class, ironically.

We wore uniforms as well, white short-sleeved shirts with button-up collars and a badge representing our class over our heart. The boy wore green shorts while the girls wore pink plaited skirts. This was a bit uncomfortable, as I hadn’t been much of a skirts person in my last life and disliked showing my legs, but I was a child and this wasn’t my old body, so I tried to ignore the discomfort.

I didn’t expect to see any of the characters in the show because I knew that Amu had moved to their neighborhood before she’d started her fifth grade, and so had met them way later.

I was, however, sort of looking forward to kindergarten itself. Staying at home all the time was, frankly, amazingly boring, and at least here, I’d have something to do. Being friends with children would be too much work, but I supposed watching them would be funny. And I would _finally_ be able to read more than just the meager amounts of letters that I’d tried to memorize by asking my parents how to say.

Reading had been one of my favorite pastimes in my past life, and it had been jarring to realize I couldn’t read most of the books in close proximity to me. There had been a time when Mama had taken me out to the park, where we’d passed a library and I’d asked her to see the books.

I’d gotten some children’s simple picture books to cover up the fact that I’d snuck off to the foreign language books section to see if there were any interesting books in English.

Sadly, there weren’t. So I made it my goal to learn Japanese as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

I walked into my classroom, trailing behind the other little ducklings. The man who appeared to be our teacher—more like caretaker—was plain looking, with light brown hair and rectangular glasses.

“Please sit in a circle, all of you,” he told us, and most of us listened. I, as the asocial child, attempted to sit in the farthest back corner and avoided touching the other children sitting near me.

They happened to all be male, and I remembered how nasty little boys had been from my kindergarten memories of my first life.

The teacher smiled kindly at all of us, and cheerfully said, now, we’re going to go in a circle and introduce ourselves. Tell us your name, how old you are, one thing you like, and one thing you don’t like. I’ll start—I’m Hiyama-sensei, I’m older then all of you, I like teaching, and I don’t bad children.”

Wow, a sense of humor. Maybe he was trying to guilt us into not causing trouble?

“Hey!” A brown-haired boy called out. “You didn’t tell us how old you are!”

Hiyama-sensei smiled mischievously. “Maybe I’ll tell you when we’re done,” he shrugged. Then he motioned to the pigtailed girl next to him.

“I’m Senri Setsuna,” she said, in a ridiculously high-pitched voice, “but you can call me Tsuna! I’m four! I like sweet stuff, I hate ugly things!”

I hated her already. Note: avoid ‘Tsuna’ to the best of my ability.

The next girl had black hair in a bowl-cut, and spoke in a soft, shy voice. “I-I’m Akino Hime. I’m f-four, and I like princesses…I don’t like mean people.”

Ah, she was going to have it hard. Maybe I’d befriend her. She seemed nice enough, and not very loud.

A spiky-haired boy was next. I couldn’t believe that his hair was naturally like that, but then again, I had pink hair.

“I’m Saito Kenji! I’m four! I like baseball! I hate books!” He grinned like an idiot shounen manga character, and stuck up two fingers in a victory sign.

Loud and simple. He probably wouldn’t bother me unless I bothered him.

Another boy was next—he was a glasses kid. I’d had glasses in my past life, and was very grateful I didn’t have them now. It was wonderful, having perfect vision with my bare eyesight.

“I am Kazuma Eito, four years old. I like to read, and I dislike loud noises.”

This child was sort of creepy. And he was staring at me. I looked at the window behind him, not wanting to meet his eyes and catch his attention.

I sort of zoned out for the rest of the introductions until a child two children away from me spoke up. I noticed the kid because…she had blue hair. I knew it wasn’t dyed, but that didn’t make my disbelief any weaker. I really was in an anime universe, wasn’t I?

“I’m Mizuki Ame. I’m four, I like mermaids, and I don’t like being cold.”

Her voice had a sort of dreamy quality to it, and I just stared at the weird line of coincidences her life seemed to be. Blue hair, named after rain and water, likes mermaids?

‘Only anime,’ I thought.

The boy next to her had _green_ hair, and spoke with a slight lisp.

“I’m Gacha Ryuto! I’m four, I like lizards, and I don’t like spinach! Blegh!” He scrunched up his face at the end of his introduction.

This kid was adorable. I felt the slightest desire to actually be friends with him. In my past life, I’d always wanted a little brother, and he was the ideal that I’d held up my imaginary little brother to. Also, it was hilarious that he disliked spinach when his hair was the color of it.

Then again, I disliked the color pink with a passion.

The girl next to me was next. She had brown pigtails in large red bows, and another lisp, though hers was even less pronounced.

“I’m Yuki Kaai. I’m four. I like flowers, and I don’t like worms.”

She didn’t seem too bad. Actually, she seemed really plain and generic, so I couldn’t think of anything to say about her.

It was my turn now, and after this, I could zone out for the rest of the ankle-biter’s intros. I’d thought up what I was going to say while the other kids talked, and based it off of their intros. I wanted to stay unnoticed, thank you very much, in the body of a future shoujo manga heroine or not.

“Hinamori Amu, four, books, onions.” Spoken as fast as possible. Combined with my hair in a high ponytail, and my fast a mask of utter boredom, this made Hiyama-sensei give me ‘The Look.’

You know, that look you give kids who are utterly unwilling to cooperate. The exasperated one.

I kind of liked him, so I offered an attempted smile as an olive branch.

Kenji then stared at me with a blush on his face, as well as two other kids who hadn’t spoken yet—a blond boy with his hair parted to the side, and another boy with bright blue eyes.

I winced internally. They were four! They hadn’t even gone through puberty yet! How were they developing crushes on me? Maybe I just mistook their faces…Also, were the other two part foreign, or was it just another of this world’s oddities?

After that, I leaned on the wall behind me and attempted to inconspicuously fall asleep. This was unlikely, as I had bright pink hair like a lighthouse beacon, but hey, a girl could dream, right?

I didn’t pay attention to the world around me until my attention was roused by the sound of my name.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm winging this. Also, some of the Japanese might be inaccurate, I'm not even close to knowledgeable in the language, but I had a friend look it over for sensibility's sake.


End file.
